C-peck-mockle country and the magic basil plant

The Boy Wonder, whilst being generally brilliant, is prone, as we all are, to moments of surprising specialness which always crack me up and then go in my mental hilarity bank to be revisited whenever I need reminding of how simple pleasures are by far the best. One of my favourites was a misunderstanding in which I was unwittingly complicit and involved a month-long holiday to Canada. We had a basil plant in full growth when we left, which I optimistically left on the windowsill despite the fact that it clearly needed watering at least once a day to survive, so naturally when we returned from our trip, despite the poppies at the front of the house being so large we couldn't see out of the window properly, the basil plant was a brown, dried-up husk of a plant sitting on the windowsill like a memorial to our neglect. Being the super efficient little worker bee I am, I spent the day of our return doing all our laundry and ordering a shopping delivery, so within 24 hours of returning home, we were more or less back on track with normal life. I put our new basil plant on the windowsill and the Boy Wonder joked that obviously his giving it a pint of water the day before had worked magic on its health. It was only the next day when we went round to visit his sister and wonder at their new house, and I heard him telling her the magical story of how he had resurrected the brown and crispy basil with a pint of water and how incredible it was that it had come back to full green leafy goodness within around 24 hours, that I realised he hadn't been joking the day before, and was under the illusion that he had brought it back to life. Needless to say, I explained what had happened through my chuckles and tried to convince him that I hadn't intended to let him think he had magical powers, but I was secretly sorry that I had said anything as I would have liked to hear him tell the story at least once more before bursting his bubble. The most recent example of his capacity to crack me up is down to a music programme shown on the BBC iPlayer called 'Ceol Country' showing (often bizarrely lame) excerpts from various country music festivals around the gaelic speaking world with the occasional subtitle in English. We had been happily calling it 'Ke-Owl' Country until one day I insisted that the Boy Wonder look up the correct pronunciation before we watched another episode. He consulted the oracle on the laptop and after a few moments of looking confused he announced 'Well, that can't be right!'.

I asked him what he'd found, but he was just standing their muttering to himself 'C-peck-mock-l- hmm, that doesn't sound right'. I went and looked over his shoulder, and he was looking at a site which had pronunciations of Irish words, and next to 'Ceol' it said c, e-peck, o-mock, l. The Boy Wonder was very sweetly taking this literally, and it wasn't until I said 'I think it means to pronounce the 'e' as in peck and 'o' as in mock', not to actually pronounce the whole words!', that he said 'I thought that didn't sound right!'. I nearly wet myself, and from now on that programme will forever be called 'C-Peck-Mock-L Country' in our house.